All five of the Steelers’ victories this season have come by a combined 25 points, each of them decided in the waning moments. It’s nice that the Steelers are finding ways to win, but if there were ever a week to see them blow out an opponent, it should be Sunday at home against the 0-8 Lions, the league’s last winless team.
To do that, the defense will have to cooperate. A unit that’s one of the NFL’s stingiest overall, tied for eighth with 21.1 points allowed per game, needs to solve its issues in second halves. Throughout this four-game winning streak, the Steelers have a first-half scoring margin of 48 to 12. But in the second halves, they’ve been outscored 64-46. They managed to eke out close wins against Seattle and Chicago in two of the past three games,but squandered 14-point leads in both and were outscored 44-24 after halftime in those two games — against journeyman backup Geno Smith and rookie Justin Fields at quarterback, respectively.
“It’s the NFL. You’ve got to stay on top of your communication. Football’s a game of momentum, and once it slips once, it’s hard to get it back,” veteran inside linebacker Joe Schobert said Thursday after practice. “Obviously, at halftime, there’s a lull, and we’ve all got to focus on coming back out in the second half with the same intensity as the first half.”
At the start of games, the Steelers defense must be pretty intense. They’re allowing just 7.8 points in first halves, which ranks third in the league behind only Buffalo (6.6) and Carolina (7.3). During their winning streak, they’ve allowed just 12 points total in the first half.
Flip that over to the second half, and the Steelers are allowing 13.4 points on average, 25th-best in the league. Over the last four, that number jumps to 16 points per second half. Only three teams have a larger gap between their first and second-half scoring defense, and only one — the 4-4 Falcons — are seeing such a dip from the first to the second half (9.2 points to 18.2 allowed after halftime).
It sounds as if head coach Mike Tomlin has made it a point of emphasis to put an end to the second-half slides for a group loaded with talent from Cam Heyward to T.J. Watt to Minkah Fitzpatrick.
“That’s Coach T’s first thing he always says in the first meeting of the week, when we go over the mistakes and learn corrections from the game before,” Schobert said. “He wouldn’t be the coach he is without being honest about stuff like that, so that’s always talked about.”
That may be, but as much as it’s a matter of being ready to play, various schematic problems have popped up in late-game comebacks for the Steelers’ opponents. And it’s not always the same player at fault — in fact, it rarely is (and it certainly didn’t help to surrender a touchdown on special teams Monday night that had nothing to do with the defense’s effort).
Both Schobert and Butler agreed that there’s no specific trend plaguing them from game to game in the second half. Against Seattle, for instance, it was the Seahawks’ commitment to stick with the running game — even facing a 14-0 deficit — that allowed them to chip away and eventually force overtime. Monday night against the Bears, they sprinkled in some direct-snap rushes to the running back and even wide receiver Darnell Mooney, but it was also Fields getting hot and dissecting the Steelers secondary, especially slot corner Arthur Maulet.
Even if you go back to the Las Vegas game Week 2, it was in the fourth quarter that Henry Ruggs took the top off the Steelers defense for a 61-yard touchdown catch that shifted the momentum. That came against cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon, who hasn’t even been active for a game since then.
This isn’t an ongoing struggle for the Steelers, either. Just last year, their defense actually got better as games went along, allowing 12 points per first half and only 9.2 per second half en route to the AFC North title. In 2019, they allowed just 8.7 points per second half, fourth-best in the league. That’s part of what makes this year’s inconsistency so hard to figure out.
“If we did, we’d obviously try to half it. We don’t like it, either,” defensive coordinator Keith Butler said with a chuckle. “We’re going to do the best we can. We need to start out the second half better than we have. That seems to be the big thing for us. I think we’ve done a good job in terms of the start of the game, but what we’ve got to do is when we come back out, we’ve got to win the first couple of series and try to get the momentum on our side.”
One other factor worth mentioning: the coin toss. In all eight games, the winner of the coin toss has elected to defer, and the Steelers have only won three. That means a few more scoring chances for opposing offenses to start the second half, but still, that won’t sit well if this trajectory continues against Detroit.
While they are the NFL’s fourth-worst scoring team overall at 16.8 points per game, the Lions are seeing a slight uptick from the first half (6.1 points) to the second (10.6). The only way the Steelers will be OK with that Sunday is if the Lions do some damage because it’s blowout city at Heinz Field.
“You don’t want to be the first one to lose to a team like the Lions,” said Schobert, who was a Pro Bowler for the 2017 Browns team that finished 0-16. “They’re going to be coming for it, and they’ve got a lot of good players.”
